If you go out for afterwork drinks with your friends tonight, please please please be careful about the amount that you imbibe. Not because of your health or drunk driving or anything like that, but because your drinking is tearing your marriage apart. Oh, you're not married? See what I mean? Then the hooch has already ruined you.

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Amanda McAlister, head of family law at British law firm Slater & Gordon, claims that a growing number of marriages are falling apart with the wife's drinking being cited as one of the primary reasons. Attributing it to "Sex and the City" drinking (which I guess means that women are going out and partying with their friends more often than they used to), McAlister says that women waiting at home for their husbands to return from the bar is a thing of the past. Oh, and they're also wearing short skirts and listening to this new fangled thing called jazz!

According to McAlister, the number of cases where a husband names his wife's alcohol abuse as a contributing factor in the dissolution of their marriage has grown by 70% in the past five years. She says, "Many of the men who come to me say their wives often don't come home until 4am."

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Maybe I'm skewed having grown up in Wisconsin — a culture where entire families hangout and drink in bars — and then moved to an urban environment where women have always gone out, but it's hard to think of women getting boozed up as such a new phenomenon or something we can blame on Sex and the City. If we are dealing with increasing rates of alcoholism among women — as is the case in several of these divorces — we might want to look more at the societal and familial pressures that surround them and not just women's propensity for partying.